What would you do if you lost your phone and hadn’t backed up your photos in say a few months, and lost those memories because there was no backup? Remembering to back up the phone periodically is one more thing I don’t want to have to do.
Whenever I would get a new iPhone, here’s the setup process: turn on, answer a handful of setup questions, sign into Apple Account, wait a few minutes for it to activate, done.
All the settings transfer, all my data appears instantly every photo and every text in the last 10 years, all my notes, calendars, music, passwords, bookmarks, keyboard shortcuts, smart home settings, everything just how I left it. Granted some of it is still in the cloud at that point and takes a little while to download in the background, but it requires no work on my part.
It’s very freeing knowing that if you lose your phone or it’s stolen, you will lose nothing
Smart switch didn’t work for me, trust me I wasted an entire evening trying. First of all I have more photos in iCloud than will fit on the internal storage of the new phone, so that’s a no-go (~300gb). Apple keeps the full rez files in iCloud and downloads them on the fly when needed, they outgrew my iPhone storage a while ago.
Second, it wouldn’t transfer my texts, it would say there wasn’t enough internal storage on the phone (Flip4 is 256gb, iCloud says I have 30gb of messages backed up including attachments). No matter what timeframe I set it to backup, all, 6 months, 1 month, etc, it just didn’t work. It would look like it was in progress for like an hour each time, and nothing would be there when it was done.
Third, calendar events, thought this one would be simple. They all transferred alright, but they’re in a separate “on phone” calendar that doesn’t sync to Google calendar, or even sync across Samsung devices, couldn’t get them to show up on my Tab S8+ no matter what I did, I played around with every sync option I could find, and there’s no way to export them from what I could tell. So that’s a no-go. Had to export my calendars on my mac, import them in Google calendar, and use that. Except then I had duplicates of everything and there’s no way to mass-delete all calendar entries in the Samsung Calendar app. Tried deleting the data in settings, the cache, etc. I had to find a third party app I could use to wipe it.
Total clusterf***, all of it. Didn’t even mention it would constantly say it disconnected during the transfer, that happened like 4 times. Tried two different nearly new OEM lightning cables. The port contacts in the phone are totally clean and I don’t have issues in any other context.
Literally all it was good for was getting my contacts over 🙄
It’s not like I haven’t had Android phones before, this is like my third one, I’ve actually had Windows phones, Androids, and Palm Pre before getting into iPhones, so I’ve seen them all, I thought both Palm and Windows phone were more intuitive than Android, which was the worst of the 4 imo.
One example of something bugging me today: on the keyboard I have text replacement shortcuts set up for 50+ things. On iPhone when you type the shortcut, the replacement text is inserted automatically unless I hit an X to cancel it. Perfect and fluid. On my Flip4, when I type the shortcut, I have to tap on the replacement in the toolbar/suggestion area, taking my focus off of the keyboard and interrupting my flow every time. There’s also no way to decouple auto-correct from predictive text, from what I can tell. I don’t want predictive, but auto-correct is nice to have. Maybe this is possible in another keyboard, but I’m not going to give someone like Google permission to read all my keyboard input.
The customizability and ability to sideload apps are nice, but I’m starting to think they don’t outweigh the cons I’m dealing with, including it not syncing anything with my Apple products without using Google or Onedrive, and I’ve lost all faith that I’ll be able to transfer my texts back to iPhone if I ever switch back, which is a big deal to me
